In the mid 70’s one of the first African bands to win worldwide popularity was a Ghanaian oufit known as Osibisa. Their mix of African (especially Highlife) and Caribbean forms made them a sensation in the mid 70s. Osibisa was the brainchild of Ghanaian Teddy Osei, a music composer who also played saxophone and drums. He had gone to London to study music. The time for Osibisa has come and gone, and Highlife is no longer a worldwide music genre.
Today, Afrobeats is dominated by mainly Nigerian artistes such as Davido, Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Burna Boy and Yemi Alade.
This Afrobeats popularity has now expanded into Ghana, another West African country. There is a new kid on the block. His name is King Promise.
Born and bred in Accra, Ghana, King Promise, aka Gregory Bortey Promise Newman, was enveloped in music from a young age. His “musichead” father inadvertently helped shape his genre and culture-spanning tastes; immersing him in everything from reggae to R&B to boybands to Ghanaian Highlife. To this day, Promise finds himself pulling from, and enjoying an incredibly wide range of sounds, both in his own sonics and also during his creative process. At the moment, he’s particularly feeling Ghanaian drill, the South African Amapiano scene and collaborating with UK artistes like NSG and Headie One for his own music.
But in a typical and classic child-of-African-parents form, Promise was focused mainly on finishing school and securing a degree up until a few years ago: “Music was never really my plan. I always loved making music but it was just more of a passion.” He was influenced by his parents who loved to play music while he was still in secondary school. He listened to what his parents listened to. This music included Reggae, Dancehall Highlife, R&B and Afrobeats.
Although he wanted to be a footballer while in secondary school, he ended up being in the school choir.
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After jumping in impromptu during a friend’s studio session, his curiosity and raw talent was sparked whilst in the booth. He started to hone in on his own sound, writing his own songs and collaborating with producers. In his last year of high school, his headmaster even heard him singing in class once and made him join the school choir for his final term. But it was while he was finishing university that everything changed for him. After releasing music officially in 2017, first on Soundcloud and then eventually across all the streaming services, Promise’s fanbase began to swell as word spread and buzz manifested locally, and before he and his family knew it, his career had taken off:
“My parents were superstars in the area before they even knew what was happening,” he says.
Nowadays, his sights are firmly set on world domination, both for himself and his peers. “To be honest, I feel like Afrobeats is gonna be the biggest genre in the world in no time,” he asserts casually. Falling under a host of different names and guises, he cites everything from Drake’s first number one single One Dance (with Wizkid) to the rapid rise of Afroswing in Europe or the international stardom of the likes of Wiz, Burna Boy and Davido on their own as evidence of his theory — a scene already making waves across continents. He beams, “I’m just happy to contribute my quarter. Because as much as my sound is local,” inspired in part by the Ghanaian music he grew up on, “it’s also global as well.” In fact, one of his main goals — aside from making people feel good — is to help form the bridge between Africa, the diaspora and the rest of the world. A mission he is making sure to actualise in his upcoming project. Armed with a new album, True To Self, King Promise has embarked on a world tour which is currently going on until December. He has just finished performances in Detroit and New York in the United States of America and is off to Europe where he will continue with performances in Paris, Amsterdam, Copehagen, Vienna, Gothenberg and Stockholm before proceeding to Tokyo in Japan, Australia and Malaysia. That is what we call taking African music to the world. Over the last decade, Afrobeats has become a global phenomenon, bringing African music into the Western mainstream. There’s now an Afrobeats category at the MTV Video Music Awards, and performers like Burna Boy and Wizkid can sell out major venues in the US and Europe.
The benefits of King Promise’s hard labour are already being felt by ordinary people in Ghana. He has opened roadside clinics where people can go and get medical aid without paying a penny. In his own words: “If God blesses you, then you must pass on that blessing to others.”
While many African artistes have been able to ride the wave of the genre’s international popularity, some musicians are now pushing for global recognition beyond its confines.
“I won’t be mad if you call me an Afrobeats artist, but it’s only because it has become the yardstick for all Africans making global music,” King Promise told CNN’s Larry Madowo in a recent interview held in Detroit.
In recent years, popular music coming out of Africa has widely been classified as Afrobeats in the global soundscape, despite encompassing styles such as hip-hop, R&B, amapiano, dancehall, highlife, and more.
King Promise, whose sound blends R&B, highlife, and hip-hop, began releasing music in 2017 and rose to international fame in 2023 with his TikTok viral dance track Terminator. But the 29-year-old singer and songwriter doesn’t want to be boxed into a single sound.
“Afrobeats kind of serves as the umbrella which all of our music comes together (under),” he says. But he adds that the label has a crossover feel “to make it sound appealing not to just to people back home but to the rest of the world as well.” ‘Afrobeats has become the yardstick for all Africans making global music”, he says.
“I don’t think that’s the best thing,” he argues.
“I make music that I love,” he explained. “If I feel like making R&B today, I make it. If I feel like making highlife I can make it. If I feel like making Afrobeats I can make it. It’s really about my direction.”
The roots of the Afrobeats genre can be traced back to Nigeria and music icon Fela Kuti, who is widely considered the architect of the similarly named genre, Afrobeat. Popularised in the 1970s, Afrobeat merged American jazz and funk with traditional Yoruba music. More recently, Afrobeat morphed into Afrobeats a looser label and catch all for all African music that took inspiration from the original Afrobeat sound.
Although King Promise understands the label from a marketing perspective in Western countries, he and other artists believe it robs them of their authenticity.
At the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, South African Afropop and amapiano singer Tyla described her win for Best Afrobeats song Water as “bittersweet” in her acceptance speech.
“The global impact that Water had on the world just proves that African music can be pop music too,” she said.
She added: “There’s a tendency to group all African artists under Afrobeats; it’s a thing, and even though Afrobeats has run things and has opened so many doors for us, African music is so diverse. It’s more than just Afrobeats.”
Nigerian superstars including Davido, Tems, Wizkid, and Burna Boy, have publicly distanced their music from the term Afrobeats.
Wizkid even took to social media in March to say that labelling his music Afrobeats was like saying, “every American artist makes rap.”
Imagine calling Jah Prayzah’s music Afrobeats . What is it called anyway?
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